Sorry for the lack of a blog post over the last week. The Bee and I welcomed our first child into the world, so been a bit busy. In fact I’m writing this from the hospital bed!
The last post on blogging as a channel and not a chore got some interesting tweets/comments (on facebook but not on the blog, exploring commenting is another blog post in my head). Specifically around a throwaway remark I made about how “Perfect is the enemy of the good”. I can’t remember which post or when (see first paragraph) but Farhan Thawar once commented that phrase on this blog. It was in response to launching products early and innovating / making them better on the fly.
I still believe this is the best way to do things. Have a long term aim/vision but create stuff and see what sticks, what should be invested in further and what doesn’t work at all and should be dropped. Unfortunately too many people, companies, heck even governments and society at large try to get things perfect before doing anything.
There was a great chapter in Peter Sheahan’s book Flip which I know I’ve blogged about before, called “action creates clarity” I totally believe that. Doing things, figuring out what works and what doesn’t is the best way to figure out what is the best strategy. I call it on the fly strategy – those not familiar with ice hockey see the wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_fly
So why am I writing about this from the hospital bed? Well, I’m scared sh**less about being a dad, but I’m going to apply on the fly strategy to fatherhood. Some things might work, Baby Bee seems to like the my singing and reading the economist (left Dr Seuss at home), some things might not, we’ve tried waking her then feeding or letting her wake up and let us know when she’s hungry, getting her on a schedule is a major task. But I don’t have time to go read a book and make a plan at every occurrence, you just do things and you do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Why should anything else be any different?
